The Story of Us (20 page)

Now,
that
would be fun. I’m sure Ben would love it. It reminded me of the time we all had to go to the cheerleading movie because that’s the only one Jon Jakes’s daughter, Olivia, would go to. Riveting pom-pom drama, the longest ninety minutes of my life.

“I don’t need anything,” she said.

“We’ll keep thinking.” Mom twisted her bracelet around and around her wrist.

“How’d it go with the cake guy yesterday?” I asked. After all, we were supposed to be having a wedding. Weddings were supposed to be
fun
.

“Oh!” Mom said. “It was great.
Unusual
. Friend of Rebecca’s. Johnny B’s bakery. Well, his bakery’s out of his
house. Big guy, Guns N’ Roses T-shirt.” She chuckled. “Drives a motorcycle. Can’t quite picture how he’s going to get the cake here, but okay. Maybe he straps it on the back. But … It’ll be beautiful. White chocolate curls all over. I wanted to eat the
picture
of it.”

Amy made a little
hmphh
, the verbal version of an eye roll.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, I did. “You disapprove of
cake
?” I said.

Mom shot me a look. Fine. All right. So my hand got a little shaky on the hostility volume control. But I guess Hailey and Amy’s mother would never enjoy a picture of cake or any food, for that matter, not even those glossy images of heaping Christmas cookies in the holiday magazines. Not even those catalogs with cheese balls and towers of nuts and chocolate truffles that spell out “Happy Holidays.” I loved those.

“I don’t disapprove of
cake
,” she said.

We all sat in the kind of silence that feels like you’re wearing it—a wool coat, the heaviest, scratchiest, most unbearable coat. Mom stared down at her muffin for blueberry answers. “I love your earrings, Amy,” she said.

“Oh!” Amy smiled. “I got these for my birthday last year. Ballet slippers. And they’re dotted with my birthstone. Pink tourmaline. It’s supposed to be lucky.”

“They look great on you,” Mom said. Ha. So she knew the trick too.

“My friend Kaylie gave them to me. I gave her the amethyst ones for her birthday. Purple. I don’t think she’s going
to stay with ballet, though. She wants to quit now that I did. My mom said I need to at least do piano if I’m not doing dance.”

“I saw a video of your recital. You’re really good,” Mom said.

Somewhere in the middle of Amy’s story about the popular girls in her science class, I heard raised, scattershot voices in the kitchen. Ted, talking to Rebecca. Only a few phrases—or at least a few relevant ones.
High. Quit. At least not at nine a.m.

Mom met my eyes. “They’ve got a little roach issue.”

Amy squealed. She lifted her feet off the floor. “Eyuw, are you kidding? Gross!”

At the foot of the stairs, Jupiter stared up at me.
A long way up,
she seemed to say.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re lucky I love you.” I carried her up, set her down at the top. She trotted down the hall. Her little backside looked so cheery. She stopped at the right door and waited. She looked at me with her melted chocolate eyes. “Very true,” I said. “I’m lucky you love me, too.”

It was a drizzly morning. I was glad. A tucked-in day sounded great, with everyone doing their own thing. I filled Jupiter’s water bowl, and she headed to it. Man, she’d been going through the water lately. She was a noisy drinker. Now she had water droplets on her beard. I tossed old Rabbit over to her, and she scratched at her blanket and bed to make a snug nest. She turned circles and settled in.

“That’s such a great idea,” I said to her. “Just get in there and get cozy.”

My phone rang. Natalie. I didn’t even feel like talking but answered anyway. Every time I ignored a call, I had the disturbing feeling that the person somehow knew I was looking at their name and making a choice. I hated to hurt people. My conscience never took a day off. “I haven’t talked to you in a million years,” I said.

“I know it,” she said. “I’m coming down Sunday morning, okay? But I thought I was driving with Oscar. He’s not answering his phone.”

“They decided to get here early. They’re camping on the beach. You should see their place—”

“He’s
there
? That asshole!”

“Wait,” I said. “What happened?” We’d all been friends for years, and I’d never heard her talk that way and mean it. Except for maybe that one time when both Gavin and Oscar refused to go to Homecoming with her. They’d planned to sleep overnight in the Video Universe parking lot for the release of War Worlds Four, and nothing would change their minds.

“I just thought … Oscar and I … Whatever. Just, whatever. I’ll be there on Sunday morning.”

There was a soft tap on my door. Mom probably. “Hey, can I call you back?”

“Fine.”

Great. Now Natalie was pissed. And I still felt awful. My
head wasn’t throbbing exactly. More like my brain had grown too large for its container. “Come in,” I said.

Jupiter stood when she saw him. She trotted over and sniffed his pant legs. She put her front paws on his knees.

“Down, girl,” I said. “Hey, I thought you’d be at work.”

What felt most dangerous is that he was beginning to look familiar to me. His eyes, those shoulders. They were thick and sloped, where Janssen’s were strong and straight across. I had to think hard to remember how Janssen’s voice sounded, because it was Ash’s voice I’d been hearing.

A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on
and
let go?

“I got down there, and Greg, my boss? He called last night and left a message, but I didn’t even check. He was giving this guy I work with some extra hours. So, day off, but I got up early anyway.”

“Too bad.”

“You work?” He sat down on the bed next to me. “Bed” had a ridiculous amount of meaning for a piece of furniture. It was a flat surface to sit on, that’s all, I told myself. But I knew that a bed usually had more stories than any other piece of furniture.

“One disastrous summer at this café, Carreras. I’m not meant to be a waitress. And then I worked for a few years for
my English teacher, doing research. Spent most of the time in the library.”

“Bummer,” Ash said. See? Janssen loved the library. I did too. We’d go and sit in the squishy chairs by the magazines and read. He liked those legal thrillers. He wouldn’t hear anything you said when he got to the exciting parts.

“Not working now, though. All this moving, and maybe going away to school.”

“LA—sun, sand, surf, baby.”

“I’m not really a sun person. I actually
like
the rain. No one likes the rain, I know. Don’t even say it. But I love it. Rain, clouds …”

“Windshield wipers going …”

I laughed.

“I love that,” he said. “It’s so peaceful.”

It surprised me. I don’t know. Those big shoulders, the dark eyes—I wouldn’t have guessed he was the kind of person to notice windshield wipers.

“So, you don’t want to go there? USC?”

It came out before I could stop it. “Not
go there
. But
leave here
.” I waited for him to laugh or narrow his eyes in a way that indicated he thought I was crazy. “Stupid, I know.”

“Why stupid?”

“It’s embarrassing. ‘Don’t want to leave home.’ Sounds like I’m a baby.”

“No it doesn’t. Not at all.” He looked at me. His eyes—
they weren’t just intense, I noticed. They were kind. He shook
his head. “You know what happened to me? You spend the last years of high school dying to get away, right? But somewhere in there it hits you. It gets real.”

“I know,” I said.

“The, what, pieces of you that you’re leaving.”

I stared at him. That was it exactly.
Exactly
. No one had put it that simply before. That
rightly
. I nodded.

“Don’t tell anyone I said that,” Ash said.

“Don’t tell anyone
I
said that,” I said.

“For some reason no one says these things. You’re not supposed to talk about that part. Why is that? It’s wrong to love your family? The place you live? It’s your
home.
It’s all who you
are
.”

“I don’t know why, but you’re right. You’re not supposed to say those things out loud.”

“I should punch something now so you know how tough I am.”

I laughed. “No.”

“I’m not the punching kind anyway. Hey, you okay?”

“I think it’s this headache. Last night … I don’t drink usually.”

But it wasn’t the headache. It was something much worse. Much, much worse. I had made Ash into some simple, hot guy in my mind. An idea I played with, more than an actual person. I had made him into a
type
. A nice, safe type. Now, though, as he sat in front of me, I saw that he was more than big, sexy shoulders and dark, intense eyes. He was warm. He was thoughtful.

Oh, God, I was in trouble now.

“Alcohol—that shit is bad for you,” he said. “I don’t know. I’ve never been much of a party person. All that standing around and talking to drunk people. Hey, I gotta do an errand for Rebecca. You guys are having some barbecue tonight, right? She needs some stuff.”

“We are? Okay. But I thought your dad just got back from the store.”

“This happens every time she sends him. She wants a head of lettuce, he brings back a cabbage. He figures, round green ball … She’s pissed, he’s pissed. A chill in the air.”

“No
F
-
I
-
T
-
I
-
N
-
G
,” I said.

“He hates all the …” He put an imaginary joint to his mouth and sucked in. He shrugged. “You want to come?”

“I think I just want to hang out here,” I said. My head, it was throbbing. God, no. I could like Ash. Really like. As a real, live whole person.

“Cool,” he said. “I hope I’ll see you tonight.”

He grinned, headed out. Images whipped past. Ropes and balloons and my family and Janssen and the little bit of life I’d lived yet and all the life that was still waiting.

I fished a book out of my bag and fell into the deep, safe hiding place of
story
. It was a book about a voyage, involving magic and good and evil. Good guys and assholes (with swords, on horses). Safety and danger, and keeping the bad away with shields and stone walls and brave soldiers. My
mother always said that our own stories were where we made sense of things, but I think
all
stories have that power. You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of
set them down
in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don’t know why stories worked that way, but they did. They’re an actual
place
where confusing things order themselves.

So I felt a little better when I went downstairs again. Jupiter
plomp-plomped
down the stairs behind me, and I let her out to pee. I gave her a biscuit, which she crunched happily. I loved giving her treats.

Mom was sitting in her sweats and having tea in front of a beautiful fire in that living room fireplace. She was reading, too. She set down her book when she saw me. The fog outside hadn’t cleared, and the huge windows in there were filled with gray-white waves and gray-white shores and gray-white seagulls flying in gray-white skies.

“Do you think Jupe is losing weight?” I asked.

“I wondered it too,” Mom said.

“She’s eating a lot. She stole Cruiser’s food this morning. He was so upset. But, still. Maybe we should weigh her.”

Mom set her book down. “She does look pretty trim.”

Jupiter loved her food. Once, she got so chunky, we had to cut down on her snacks and keep a weight chart for her on the fridge. It didn’t help all that much. Maybe we should have put up pictures of thin model dogs by her bowl for inspiration.

“I lifted her up the stairs earlier, and it wasn’t too bad,” I said.

“Of course, she hasn’t been to Gram’s in a while. That’s where she gets to eat all the good stuff.”

I sat down on the floor, my back to the couch. Jupiter sat right next to me, leaned against my side. I think she liked when we sat on the floor, when we joined her world. Of course, whenever I was on the floor doing sit-ups or something, she’d climb onto my stomach. “Hey, remember her first birthday?”

Mom laughed. “Favorite things: underwear.”

We’d had a party, just Mom and me and Ben and Jupiter. We made homemade dog biscuits. Ate hot dogs. Drew a poster too, and hung it over her water bowl. The poster showed her favorite things, which were mostly the stuff she’d chewed up that year. Garden hoses, underwear, socks.